"Perfectibility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... law, or the resentment of the offended private parties. Morality neither promises rewards after death nor denounces future chastisement for error. The disciples of this independent doctrine hold forth instances of the perfectibility of human actions, produced by the unassisted decisions of human intellect on the limits of right and wrong. They admire virtue, because it is beautiful. They practice it, because it is heroic. They do not abstain from the gratification of an intemperate wish under the belief that it is sinful, ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... all the leading men are Unitarians, a creed peculiarly acceptable to the pride and self-sufficiency of our nature, asserting, as it does, the independence and perfectibility of man, and denying the necessity of atonement or sanctification ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... had greatly increased it in 1770, by marrying a daughter of one of the richest planters in Hayti. Like many other men of his rank at that time, he was an ardent admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and a firm believer in the native nobility and general perfectibility of man. He was a very popular landlord, and his generosity was equal to his wealth. During six months of a severe famine he fed the peasants of Montsallier at his own expense. He was one of the ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... philosophy, which believed in ennui as an evidence and a means of human perfectibility. The only exertions which it is capable of producing, are of a subordinate character. It may give to passion a fearful intensity, consequent on a state of moral disease; but human virtue must be ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... peerage,—audiences inclusive of the most notable people in London, the nine lectures that are published under the title of "The Perfect Way," and at the time these lectures inspired a profound interest. Their central theme is the Pre-existence and Perfectibility of the soul. "The intuition," she says, "is that portion of the mind whereby we are enabled to gain access to the interior and permanent region of our nature, and there to possess ourselves of the ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... faith in the perfectibility of man. His doctrine was one of non-intervention; that the powerful can afford to be lenient; that mankind continually moves toward the light if not too much interfered with. By his influence the darker shapes ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... in a province peculiar to these times, viz., in science and art, in physics, in politics, in economics, and mechanics. And great as are its attainments at present, still, as I have said, we are far from being able to discern, even in the distance, the limit of its advancement and of its perfectibility. ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... completion as it is being built, and when it is built remains as it is. The architect has made I and carried out his plan, and there is an end of the matter. It is not thus that we view Nature, for everywhere we see signs of perfectibility in the component parts and in the whole together. Only if the Cathedral had in it the power to be continually making its foundations deeper, to be ever towering higher, and to be perpetually shaping itself into sublimer form, should we look on Nature as a Cathedral. But in that case the mind ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... to these speculative heights, we are bound to confess that human reason contains not only ideas, but ideals, which possess, not, like those of Plato, creative, but certainly practical power—as regulative principles, and form the basis of the perfectibility of certain actions. Moral conceptions are not perfectly pure conceptions of reason, because an empirical element—of pleasure or pain—lies at the foundation of them. In relation, however, to the principle, whereby reason sets bounds to a freedom which is in itself without law, and consequently ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... [Footnote: This industrious Scotchman (of whose name I have only given the initials) was not without some share of humor. On hearing that a certain modern philosopher had carried his belief in the perfectibility of all living things so far, as to say that he did not despair of seeing the day when tigers themselves might be educated, Dr. T. exclaimed, "I should like dearly to see him in a cage with ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... economy, you know," said Mr. Brooke, smiling towards Mr. Casaubon. "I remember when we were all reading Adam Smith. There is a book, now. I took in all the new ideas at one time—human perfectibility, now. But some say, history moves in circles; and that may be very well argued; I have argued it myself. The fact is, human reason may carry you a little too far—over the hedge, in fact. It carried me a good way at one time; ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... use, among which he notes: grand-jury, grand-juror, eulogist, consignee, consignor, mammoth, maltreatment, iceberg, parachute, malpractice, fracas, entailment, perfectibility, glacier, fire-warden, safety-valve, savings-bank, gaseous, lithographic, peninsular, repealable, retaliatory, dyspeptic, missionary, nervine, meteoric, mineralogical, reimbursable; to quarantine, revolutionize, retort, ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... nineteenth century should be such a Vandal, and that my Uncle Roland should talk in a strain that Totila would have been ashamed of, within so short a time after my father's scientific and erudite oration on the Hygeiana of Books,—was enough to make one despair of the progress of intellect and the perfectibility of our species. And I have no manner of doubt that, all the while, my uncle had a brace of books in his pockets, Robert Hall one of them! In truth, he had talked himself into a passion, and did not know what nonsense he was saying. ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... it if the work of the great masters of science during the past four centuries were now undone or forgotten. Never has philanthropy, humanitarianism, seen such development as now; and though we must all beware of the folly, and the viciousness no worse than folly, which marks the believer in the perfectibility of man when his heart runs away with his head, or when vanity usurps the place of conscience, yet we must remember also that it is only by working along the lines laid down by the philanthropists, by the ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... nature and causes of variability; and the reader will find in the present work an able discussion on the whole subject, which will probably lead him to pause before he admits the existence of an innate tendency to perfectibility"—or towards BEING ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... such censure is undeserved, for they are quite as much in earnest as their neighbours, so long as the impulse lasts. The true explanation is, that they have survived their first passion, and that their faith is somewhat shaken in the boyish creed of the absolute perfectibility of woman. The great disappointment of life does not make them misanthropes—but it forces them to caution, and to a closer appreciation of character than is usually undertaken in the first instance. They have become, perhaps, more selfish—certainly more suspicious, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... of a determination of it, from the enmity of the opposing parties—The principal argument against the perfectibility of man and of society has never been fairly answered—Nature of the difficulty arising from population—Outline of the ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus |
